$5 Sensor Turns LCD Monitors Into Touchscreens 98
An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from ExtremeTech: "Researchers at the University of Washington's aptly named Ubiquitous Computing Lab can turn any LCD monitor in your house into a touchscreen, with nothing more than a $5 sensor that plugs into the wall and some clever software." The system works by measuring changes that your hand creates in the electromagnetic signature of the monitor. Surprisingly, it offers some pretty fine-grained detection, too: "full-hand touch, five-finger touch, hovering above the screen, pushing, and pulling." The "$5 sensor" part is mostly theoretical for now to those of us who don't live in a lab, though; on the other hand, "co-author Sidhant Gupta tells Technology Review that the $5 sensor uses off-the-shelf parts, and the algorithms are included in the paper, so it would be fairly easy for you — or a commercial entity — to recreate the uTouch system."
The LCD monitor will make a lousy touchscreen (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not really designed to have your finger smashing against it. It better have a hard surface.
Gorilla arm is bad! (Score:2, Insightful)
This is bad, who wants gorilla arm from using their monitor? Monitors weren't designed to be touch interfaces for very good reasons. Unless your at a kiosk or a tablet, it's just not practical to use your arms that way. Leave gorilla arm to the 800 pound gorilla that is Steve Ballmer and Microsoft.